Author: hamishmacdonald

I’ll soon be posting free, downloadable electronic versions of all my novels on this site. In advance of that, here’s a comment I wrote on indie author/publisher Zoe Winter‘s website (which I copyedited here, ’cause I can’t help myself).

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I recently discovered that one of my novels had been bundled with a couple of others and made available for download as a bittorrent file.

Three things:

1) Quality control.
Which version are they sending out? I’ve made corrections to my books, and have recently been going back to try and keep the formatting in the e-book versions.

I submitted my books to a number of sites years ago that did their own conversions, and the prevalent thinking about e-books is “It’s all raw text!”, which isn’t true, completely ignores the informational aspect of typesetting (e.g. I use italics to denote internal monologue — lost in this type of conversion), and conversion often gets line-breaks wrong.

So the end result looks a mess — and since the biggest criticism of indie work is quality control, I wish I could ensure that people got the best version of the book.

I want to share my book through Smashwords, ’cause it’s the biggest and best model for e-book distribution going, but they insist that you convert your book through their site, and when I’ve tried with my books (in a variety of formats) it’s done a very, very bad job of it. So I’m not publishing through them until they fix that.

2) Torrents feel dirty.
Generally, we use torrents online to get content we’re not supposed to have. So having my content distributed that way just feels like having it stolen, even though I’m willing to give it away. I suppose people swap e-books back and forth, which is great, but torrents seem to commodify it.

3) What’s it for?
I’m not sure what my intention is in providing e-books anyway. I don’t write or publish for the money, but it does feel a bit weird to see the stats on my books and see that, wow, neat!, they’ve been downloaded thousands of times from various websites. But”¦ then what?

I’m not looking for approval or validation or love or any of that. I have that in my life. I’m happy to write stories in a vacuum, but sharing them with others, knowing they’ve occupied that imaginative space with you, is really rewarding.

Except it doesn’t translate into any kind of social or financial capital I can do anything with. I hear good things from the people who buy and read physical copies of my books, and they spread the word to others. This e-business, though — I can’t tell if it does anything.

Then there’s the career aspect: As authors we’re constantly being exhorted to do more, pitch and market ourselves, get bigger (usually without any discussion whatsoever about what we’re meant to do with this new-found bigness). There’s an unspoken implication that writers are all supposed to be very driven, ambitious, even aggressive entrepreneurs, too, and that we all, of course, want one thing. But nobody names it, because “rich and famous” is ugly, infantile, and embarrassing.

As with so many domains in life, it seems the only measures people understand as “success” are celebrity, numbers, and money. That’s not what writing is about — not when you’re in the moment of doing it or reading it — yet it’s how we assess it.

I’ve recently bought Jeff Vandermeer’s book, Booklife, which I believe explores these questions. I’ll be interested to see where that line of questioning leads me.

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Copywriting note: ‘That’, ‘very’, and ‘actually’ can almost always be cut. I think we say them just to give our speech better meter.

Very.
Natalie Goldberg first introduced me to the idea that superlatives are generally unnecessary. Most things in life are or are not a certain way; it’s binary. It’s stronger, she says, to just declare that a thing is [whatever] than to try too hard with emphasis and blow it.

That.
‘That’ can clarify, but usually it just wastes space:

• “He told me that he was leaving.”
• “He told me he was leaving.”

No different, and there’s one less wrinkle for your brain to process.

Actually.
Most people just use this word as a beat. Again, it’s the binary thing: Most events in life happen or don’t happen; most things are or are not. Reinforcing their reality doesn’t add anything meaningful.

“She was actually very angry.”

Wasn’t she just angry?

The only place it’s useful is in stating an objection, reversing the idea in question, as in: “Actually, it’s not okay for you to bite me there.”

Or, I suppose, if you’re expressing disbelief — but, again, I think you can leave the effect up to the reader to interpret.

“He was four years old. He tied his own shoes.”

That does the job without us having to underscore that this is exceptional.

Okay, time to get back to work.

I’m even copy-editing this silly thing: I just changed “Natalie Goldberg was the one who first introduced me” to “Natalie Goldberg first introduced me”.

This is the kind of bonsai writing I spent my day doing. I’m grateful to be involved in copywriting, because it’s taught me a great deal about writing — especially the marketing copy, in which you have to question every bit of mental work you ask the reader to do.

It’s like watching Casablanca versus a modern film: Casablanca sounds like a stage-play that ran for ten years, with every word specially chosen and polished before it made it to the screenplay. Most modern films sound like a couple of people ate pizza, drank beer, said a bunch of stuff back and forth, and just wrote that down.

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A look at the four main publishing options available for getting your book out into the world.

I have work, but I don’t have a work-day, per se, where I go into an office and sit at a desk for eight hours then go home. I’m a self-employed copywriter with one main client, so I have an editor I video-conference with once a week, sometimes twice, and from time to time I have phone calls with the company’s head of marketing. I love and respect these people, and they seem to really like what I do for them.

I do my writing for them — which I quite enjoy, since I respect what the company is about, I can work wherever I like, and then I’m free to record my podcast, write and make books, go out and play… It’s a perfect set-up, really.

But sometimes it’s hard. The work is great, but getting to the work can really put my head into the walnut-crusher. If a day goes by and I haven’t produced anything, I feel guilty about it, which wrecks my free time.

My tactic up until now has been to make up all kinds of rules for myself, to bully myself into getting stuff done — and that’s often just as fun as it sounds.

Looking in from the outside at all the stuff I do, I don’t imagine many people would call me a procrastinator, but my tactics for getting work out of myself have often led me to a lot of avoidance and wasted time. I don’t even get to enjoy that time, ’cause I know there’s something else I should be doing.

Fed up with this crazy cycle, I ordered a book. That’s what I do when I want to learn something: I get a book. (I’ve been buying a lot of books lately; I feel a bout of creative output is coming on, and I think I’m stocking the pond for that.) So after reading reviews about several books on procrastination, I ordered The Now Habit by Neil Fiore.

As someone who’s a writer, I don’t particularly like my approach as a reader: I read books to get something. With fiction, I want to see how someone does something stylistically. In non-fiction, I usually choose instructional books: I want to be able to understand or do something after reading them. These books usually turn out to be one small idea wrapped up in a lot of pages — sometimes the title alone gives you the whole idea. (I’ve never read Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway because… y’know, I got it.)

The Now Habit was a pleasant surprise. Not only did it contain a lot of different angles on procrastination and give lots of practical strategies for dealing with it, more importantly, it shifted the whole topic for me. Before I even did a thing, my whole experience of work was transformed.

My approach to work this past week was entirely different. It was fun!I’m getting more done, but not because I should or I have to, but because I want to and I got a real sense of accomplishment out of it. If that wasn’t enough, I’ve also found great pockets of truly free time that I’m allowed to fully enjoy — like now, hanging out on a Friday afternoon with no guilt, nothing hanging over my head, and with a big project now behind me.

I won’t try to summarise it here, because others have already done an excellent job of it. I recommend reading the book, though. These summaries are helpful as a reminder, but I don’t think you’d really get the whole impact of the book from them.

• A mind-map of the concepts in The Now Habit.
• Atextual summary of the book.
• Adiscussion of the book with some MP3 downloads.

I love making progress, and I love finding things that work. This book is a win on both counts, and I’m grateful for the difference it’s making to my experience of daily work. Today, for instance, was a five-star day. That’ll only make sense to me, but it’s a really good thing and makes me feel like a champ.

Admittedly, The Now Habit has an awful cover that makes it look like a cross between a generic business book and a hot dog slathered in ketchup and mustard. But it’s good. If you’re in charge of motivating yourself to produce work, I tell you that this book will make a difference for the better.

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In this episode, we’ll review all the bits of legality and registration involved in publishing a book — from protecting your ideas to making sure your book can be found anywhere in the world.

A preview of the next series of podcasts which will teach you how to turn your finished work into a physical product you can share — in other words, a book!

My partner took this picture of a statue on the grounds of Aberdeen University when we were up there two weekends ago:

The statue is accompanied by a plaque giving credit to the artist and providing some context for interpretation. The last paragraph struck me as a beautiful notion, and my mind keeps returning to it.

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Today I got my stuff partly done. I declare this a triumph. (Self-employment is a form of sorcery fraught with demons.)

This evening I put tags on my money-tree for things I am glad of.

I keep learning about friend’s lives from forwarded Daily Mail articles. For those outside the UK, the Daily Mail is the lowest of the bottom-feeding tabloids. I can’t find attribution for the quote, but journalist Polly Toynbee said, “The Mail’s founder, Lord Northcliffe said his winning formula was to give his readers ‘a daily hate’ — and it does.” If you fear anything in this life — gays, immigrants, whatever — the Mail will give you the fuel to keep you feeling justified in your hatred (while remaining docile, inactive, and manipulable).

First, I learned about one of my best friends getting divorced (in which the muckrakers trawled up every irrelevant fact about him, his wife, and her family for inclusion in the piece). Then, yesterday, I learned about a friend’s suicide.

“Friend” is overstating it: we went to a movie once shortly after he’d moved here to start his life again after breaking up with a television celebrity. He was a nice guy going through a difficult time. He’d messaged me recently, saying he’d been to Africa to do some work there, and it sounded like he was finding his feet again. Apparently not: last week he left a grim message on Facebook and did away with himself.

This event leaves me thinking two things today:

1) Death is weird. You’re typing away in the office, or you’re at home having a meal, then suddenly a zebra prances through the room. What the hell? Stranger, though, is that we continue on as if we hadn’t seen it. Or we’re incapable of processing it (it doesn’t bleep in our barcode reader) so we have to just shake our heads, keep calm and carry on.

2) Gay life is hard. I encountered this guy on a gay dating site (“dating” might also be overstating it). The tabloids are telling one story, the one they’re interested in, about his marriage and divorce with the TV star, but a lot of us in this town have another in our heads, the story of his life since. Things between us were merely friendly, but as I spoke with friends at the time, it turned out he’d approached us all, desperate for contact, even abuse.

Maybe it’s not a gay thing — we all have the potential for periods of mental illness, even if we’re uncomfortable with the idea — but it doesn’t help to have media forms like the Mail fomenting hatred against you, and even within the gay “community” we’re particularly mercenary, dealing with each other as objects that are either useful or not. (Difference and lack of perfection are to be derided, so as to distance ourselves from them.)

I tried to always be empathetic and respectful in my exchanges with others, but, as in this case, the guy and I weren’t going anywhere, so despite our intending to meet again sometime for a friendly drink or a movie, we never did. Now I’m left in this situation, again, of wondering what I should have done, could have done.

Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving, and I am full of thanks that I’ve got my fella and am free to just be in my life and stay away from the scene. I’m grateful to be spared that loneliness, the trying. I’m also grateful for the friends and family who’ve supported me through the years, including a dark period I went through that, thanks to them, turned out differently from this story.

Of course, I’m also aware that at any moment the zebra could barge into the room and wreck the place. But what can you do?

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We need a term for the visual period we’re living in. There’s a definite style emerging, something we’ll recognise when it’s past (and possibly roll our eyes at, but hopefully not), but we don’t have a name for it.

Whatever the over-arching theme is, it has something to do with birds. (Owls and sparrow-y-type things seem to be most popular.)

Like this template for Apple’s Pages word-processor.

…the Twitter logo…

…every other thing for sale on Etsy…

…and shop signage.

Hand-lettered fonts and graphics are everywhere, too, like in the posters for Juno and Away We Go (both of which feature pregnancy; hmm).

I’m not complaining. I like the look of these things, because they look like people made them. In fact, I just redesigned this website ’cause I realised its main design message seemed to be “Look, Hame got a Mac!” I make books by hand, so I figured the site should reflect that hand-made experience better, so I changed it, the main difference being that all the if-you-buy-Mac-software-you’ve-seen-them buttons changed to hand-lettered text (based on the Dr Strangelove titles, actually).

DIY culture is on the rise, and this aesthetic just helps make it look approachable and fun. Is this a movement a response to the glut of consumption foisted on us, that we’re not only sick of but whose consequences we’re now legitimately afraid of?

A few years ago, a Finnish design student named Ulla-Maaria Mutanen beautifully articulated the attractions and benefits of this movement in her Draft Craft Manifesto.

Whatever the motivation, I love that people are hungry for a culture other real people have made, and they’re allowed to make, too.

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